Thought on the creative process and everything that pertains to it. That means life in general

Sunday, September 23, 2007

nightmares and privacy issues.

Work this week has been an absolute nightmare. My boss has been off for the week and the entire and I and my two colleagues have spent it sorting out things she's either forgotten or neglected to do or things she's stuffed up. We're also working on a tight deadline for a major project that has been blown out of the water by cleaning up after her. This has played havoc with everything from team relationships, hit rock bottom, to the rest of the company's view of our team, also plummeting.

I work in a largely male dominated business and my boss is a young woman in her first management role. My colleagues are very unforgiving of failure and have been putting the knife in with management and the board at every opportunity. I've been following round trying to remain supportive and pointing out that she's trying to do the job she was hired for, with very little quality support, rather than doing the job everyone, apart from the director who hired her (who has now left), wants and expects her to do. Something I'm struggling with because of the number of headaches she's causing me. Between that and her relative inexperience, and the problems that come with her youth and inexperience, she's got very little chance of surviving in her post unless she gets some decent guidance from her management.

Coming home and having a chance to watch both the second part of Comics Britannia and Jonathan Ross's documentary "In Search of Steve Ditko" brightened my weekend immeasurably. Comics Britannia looked at British adventure comics from The Eagle to Battle and Action in the seventies and was, once again, excellent. Listening to Pat Mills talk about Charlies War was definitely the highlight. The clever intercutting of images from the comic and documentary footage from the first world war showed how sublimely perfect the comic was. Hearing MIlls describe the story as something more from a girls comic of the period was a real eye opener. I'd realised on a subconscious level I think that the book was very underplayed and more concerned with the personal relationships of the teen protagonist and his friends than the heroics that were standard fare in boys comics, but it never really entered my conscious brain. In many ways it was very much a forerunner for Alan Moore's Halo Jones.

In search of Steve Ditko didn't really tell me anything new but it's always interesting to hear others talk about genius. The history of his work in the medium, even with the focus on Spider-Man and Dr Strange, was entertaining and the ending, where Ross, in the company of Neil Gaiman, playing Etta Candy to Ross's Wonder Woman, finally met Ditko, and chatted to him for 25 minutes, sans camera, were priceless. How many people could have made a documentary about a semi reclusive artist and actually respected his wish for privacy, not speaking of the details of their meeting? Very few I imagine. The style of the documentary was similar to those of Michael Moore or Louis Theroux but I doubt either of those gents would have put Ditko's right to privacy above their film or programme. Good work Mr Ross.